4 ms·

Inflation on the price of knowledge: French universities boycott journals

4 points by p4bl0 13y ago

Jugurtha 13y ago
This is so true. I'm preparing my thesis, and my days consist of reading many, many articles. Since it's about ECG and I'm in Electronics Engineering, the readings spread across multiple journals and publishers(cardiology, signal processing, etc)...Most articles are in the 25 to 35 dollars range. I read a lot of them(I have to). It would be in the thousands of dollars. The good news is, I have free access through research centre. The bad news: The average quality of articles sucks. As in really sucks. I just start reading and it's clear the authors just want to increase their index of published articles (there's also the h-index which pissed a lot of academics.). A lot of my work consists of throwing articles in the bin. It makes me laugh when "researchers" publish an article in a renowned medium where the benefit is incremental. I love it when they do "synthetic"(computer generated) ECG with a nice, big, fat QRS complex with no noise.. Oh wait, no.. They add a "Gaussian" noise and then apply their algorithm and get "100%" detection. It is just so stupid. I'm working with ECG that's been acquired on real people, in real conditions. The noise is just incredible (power line, breathing, contact, etc). I look at their ECG and I want to burn the digital version of that article. No content, or worse, poor content. Really light articles. You read them and you feel sick. Quick, quick, publish ! Anything. Just ship it. Although there are some articles which you read and you're like "Wow". Rant over.
- dalke 13y ago
  It gets worse once you no longer have institutional access. I developed an algorithm a couple of years ago, which I believe is novel in the literature. But in order to write a paper, I needed to do the literature study. Turns out, back in the 1970s there were a few people who were in the same neighborhood as my work, though not the same. Then in the 1980s/1990s, the field moved towards one of two other approaches. The only way to find this is to look at dozens of old paper. At, as you say, about $25 a pop. Ain't going to spend rent money on that. Thankfully, those papers are old enough that the local university chemistry library still has them in the stacks.

4 points by p4bl0 13y ago

This is so true. I'm preparing my thesis, and my days consist of reading many, many articles. Since it's about ECG and I'm in Electronics Engineering, the readings spread across multiple journals and publishers(cardiology, signal processing, etc)...Most articles are in the 25 to 35 dollars range. I read a lot of them(I have to). It would be in the thousands of dollars. The good news is, I have free access through research centre. The bad news: The average quality of articles sucks. As in really sucks. I just start reading and it's clear the authors just want to increase their index of published articles (there's also the h-index which pissed a lot of academics.). A lot of my work consists of throwing articles in the bin. It makes me laugh when "researchers" publish an article in a renowned medium where the benefit is incremental. I love it when they do "synthetic"(computer generated) ECG with a nice, big, fat QRS complex with no noise.. Oh wait, no.. They add a "Gaussian" noise and then apply their algorithm and get "100%" detection. It is just so stupid. I'm working with ECG that's been acquired on real people, in real conditions. The noise is just incredible (power line, breathing, contact, etc). I look at their ECG and I want to burn the digital version of that article. No content, or worse, poor content. Really light articles. You read them and you feel sick. Quick, quick, publish ! Anything. Just ship it. Although there are some articles which you read and you're like "Wow". Rant over.

dalke 13y ago
It gets worse once you no longer have institutional access. I developed an algorithm a couple of years ago, which I believe is novel in the literature. But in order to write a paper, I needed to do the literature study. Turns out, back in the 1970s there were a few people who were in the same neighborhood as my work, though not the same. Then in the 1980s/1990s, the field moved towards one of two other approaches. The only way to find this is to look at dozens of old paper. At, as you say, about $25 a pop. Ain't going to spend rent money on that. Thankfully, those papers are old enough that the local university chemistry library still has them in the stacks.